Country’s Jamey Johnson broods on ‘Guitar Song’

By JON CARAMANICANew York Times News Service

Monday

Sep 27, 2010 at 8:00 AM

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Jamey Johnson hasn’t gotten around to decorating his new digs here, in the space that once housed Chet Atkins’ office in the old RCA building, one of the more rickety, less glittery boxes on Music Row. During a visit this month, the main room had a pair of chairs and a small table. In an ashtray was the withered end of a joint, whose smell suffused the room. On a shelf by the wall sat a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in a size usually associated with soft drinks.“We call this the Widowmaker,” Johnson said, then laughed.It’s good to hear Johnson laugh. A relief, actually. He laughs more than you might think, more than his heavy eyes might indicate. Certainly more than in his songs, which are among the blackest in country music. Since re-emerging two years ago after some time out of the spotlight, he’s become the great brooder of the modern country era — maybe the only brooder.“That Lonesome Song” (Mercury Nashville), his second major-label album, from 2008, was effortlessly brutal, with Johnson digging deep to tackle divorce and addiction. It was among the most lauded of recent country records, garnering five Grammy nominations for Johnson, as well as wins for song of the year, for the single “In Color,” at both the Country Music Association and Academy of Country Music awards last year.But that subject matter is mostly in the rear view on his stirring new 25-song double album, “The Guitar Song.” Instead, on this skillful record, he positions himself as a first-rate preservationist of classic country songwriting, someone who may be out of step with the times but isn’t showy about it. His stand for the country values of yesteryear is quiet, and often thrilling.It’s all the more so because Johnson has even found ways to lament his newfound success, or the specter thereof. No longer an upstart outsider, he’s now a steady if often reluctant part of the country music establishment, with one gold record behind him and another critical favorite now on his hands. But listening to “The Guitar Song,” it’s easy to wonder whether doing well might be harder for him to endure than his old suffering.The change in perspective comes in the first track, “Lonely at the Top.” A never-recorded song written in part by Keith Whitley, who died in 1989 of alcohol poisoning, it’s a self-deprecating poke. Johnson sits at a bar, spilling his troubles to someone who has it much worse, and who reminds him, “It might be lonely at the top/But it’s a bitch at the bottom.”These days, Johnson, 35, isn’t quite sure which end he’d rather be on. His success has meant a significant uptick in professional obligations, creating painful disruptions that are hard to talk about. Johnson barely moves when he speaks, and he doles out words stingily, suggesting steady discomfort, as if holding his breath and waiting for the moment to pass.“There was a time in my life I wasn’t too far away from a good friend,” he said, “and for the past three years, it’s been just me and my road family.” His schedule has taken a toll on his relationship with Kylee, his young daughter by his ex-wife, Amy. “Her friends are coming home and showing their dads what they did in school today. She doesn’t have that option.”Like so many other people in Johnson’s life, she gets a song, “Baby Don’t Cry”: “You’re never alone/When you need your daddy/Just pick up the phone.”Only a few songs on this album feel specific to Johnson’s moment, but they’re easily the most affecting, the ones that slowly, surely strangle any romantic idea of what it’s like to be on top. “I guess I’m going to have to learn to be happy with it,” he said, “because I’m running out of people to bitch at.” The long hair, the scraggly beard, the cheeks just this side of ruddy, the ease in talking about life’s murky corners: Johnson is often labeled an outlaw in the spirit of Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard.But it’s a lazy designation that appears to be less meaningful on this album than the last, which at least engaged directly with substance abuse. The struggles are softer here. “I thought Jack Daniel’s was the working man’s tea/It was the window to the life I used to lead,” he sings on “Good Times Ain’t What They Used to Be,” the peppiest song on the second disc, which is meant to be the more optimistic of the two, though only barely. One song, “Can’t Cash My Checks,” refers to the growing of marijuana, and “My Way to You,” with its talk of white lines and high times, only obliquely refers to cocaine.Long before Johnson was an outlaw of any sort, or even a sometimes surly resident of the country-music charts, he was a careful student of country songwriting. He learned guitar at his father’s knee as a child growing up poor in Alabama. He earned a music scholarship to Jacksonville State University — “I whizzed through music theory,” he said — but left school after finding it too restrictive.After moving to Nashville in 2000, he owned a construction company while singing demos for local songwriters. When his own career wasn’t taking off, he made a name for himself as a songwriter and had a hand in Trace Adkins’ hit tribute to the female anatomy, “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” He also won song of the year awards from the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music for “Give It Away,” a wry breakup song that was a No. 1 Billboard country hit for George Strait. Johnson may be dark, but he’s funny.His first major-label album, “The Dollar” (BNA), from 2006, was a mildly tougher variation on Nashville norms; the title track was his first and only hit before he was dropped. In the downtime that followed, he made brief, cryptic appearances on “Nashville,” an ill-fated 2007 Fox reality show about country music. Asked about it in an interview last year, he was succinct: “Never ask me about that show again.” It was the inspiration for “Playing the Part” on the new album, in which Johnson skewers himself for his skewed ambition: “It’s so complicated, I really hate it/Why’d I ever wanna go so far/Taking depression pills in the Hollywood Hills.”In recent years, the idea of outlaw country has become a stand-in for a ragged, pugnacious sound that flies in the face of mainstream Nashville’s polish. But while Johnson is a clear student of the outlaw movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, he’s not interested in replicating it.“That Lonesome Song” was a deeply distilled take on outlaw country, stripping bare its hyperactivity and posturing, leaving only bubbling resentment behind that played well with Johnson’s stoicism. But Johnson is also a naturally smooth singer — there’s barely a rasp to be heard in his voice, which sounds stern but is deceptively supple — and for all its melancholy, “The Guitar Song” is a mellow album. It doesn’t repudiate its predecessor so much as cast it in a different light.He took a catholic approach to assembling it, mixing his own material with covers of tunes by Mel Tillis and Vern Gosdin among others, blurring and rewriting the tradition he’s meant to be upholding. Johnson has earned the right to his idiosyncrasies, even if they’re not musical. “I’m nobody’s slave,” he said indignantly. “I’m nobody’s property at all, of any kind.” But like many rebels, he’s not a loose cannon; he’s just adhering to a different set of values than the ones expected of him. His cover of Gosdin’s “Set ‘Em Up Joe,” recorded the morning after Gosdin died last year, is lighthearted and faithful, and his take on Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times” is downright tender. (His toughest number, the savage “Mental Revenge,” is a Tillis cover.)Much of the album is given over to gentle, elegantly written heartbreak numbers like “That’s How I Don’t Love You” and “Thankful for the Rain” (“I guess I should be thankful for/All the nights of straight downpours/And soaking up every drop I get.”). “Even the Skies Are Blue,” one of the finest moments, is a beautiful, plangent piece of modern country-soul:

That Johnson would like to be left alone to tend to his craft is most clear on “That’s Why I Write Songs,” recorded after hours at the Ryman Auditorium, the onetime home of the Grand Ole Opry and one of Nashville’s most hallowed spaces. As he alternates between plainspoken talk and soft crooning — “I remember how it blew my mind/When I played a song and watched a grown man cry” — the space in the room is palpable, as if you’re listening to him from high up in an empty mezzanine. He sounds alone, and happy about it.Needless to say, an artist so invested in mood is bound to have an agonized relationship with country radio, generally the primary engine of industry success. On this subject, too, Johnson is firm: “There’s no answer I want to give on that.”But when left to his own devices, he can be expansive, speaking at length about producing a coming album for the Blind Boys of Alabama. A week of recording sessions in Nashville included appearances by George Jones, Hank Williams Jr., Vince Gill, Bobby Bare, the Oak Ridge Boys and more. Johnson also flew in his father, who sang on one song. “There wasn’t one person who didn’t bawl like a baby or bust their heart open at least once,” he said. Johnson spent a handful of days in New York this month, feeling the tug of obligation. He played at Joe’s Pub as part of the Country Music Association’s Songwriters Series, where he briefly nodded off onstage.The next night, at the Highline Ballroom, his show began sluggishly. Johnson looked fatigued, maybe bored. For more than an hour, he gave a lonely, desolate performance, which seemed to crawl to a stop with a version of the George Jones chestnut “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and a dark version of “In Color,” a final nail of dolor.But then something shook loose in Johnson. He told the audience to put their cameras away, lest they capture him at something short of his best and most sober. “You enjoy your night off,” he said dryly, “Let me enjoy mine.” Then the band burst into a familiar cover to match the mood, one that Johnson appeared all too happy to sing: “Take This Job and Shove It.”

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